Sunday, March 05, 2017

Thousands
of guards have been deployed to patrol Hungary’s 100-mile southern
border with Serbia, where soldiers and prison inmates are expanding a
barbed wire fence into an electrified 13ft barrier. Armed with heat
sensors and cameras, it features loudspeakers blaring messages in
English, Arabic and Farsi.

“Attention,
attention. I'm warning you that you are at the Hungarian border,”
the messages say. “If
you damage the fence, cross illegally, or attempt to cross, it’s
counted to be a crime in Hungary. I’m warning you to hold back from
committing this crime. You can submit your asylum application at the
transit zone.”

But
the “transit zones” allow just a handful of migrants to
cross each day at two designated border posts, leaving at least 7,000
people trapped in Serbia in dire conditions and increasing
desperation.

“They
treat us like animals, and we are humans,” revealed Shahid Khan.
“When they beat us, they were laughing with each other. The
policemen, when they beat us, they are taking selfies with us...They
beat us with everything, with fists, kicks and batons. They
deliberately gave us bad injuries. ”

As extreme
cold swept Europeat
the start of 2017 and temperatures in Hungary plummeted to -20C, a
new form of torment was reported. Refugees said border police would
take their drinking water and pour it over them before abandoning
them in the snow, sometimes taking coats, clothes and shoes. They
were dumping them at random points at the border in the middle of the
night and exposing them to potential death by hypothermia with people
showing up in Serbia completely naked.

Human
Rights Watch (HRW) Balkans and Eastern Europe researcher, Lydia Gall,
explained, “It’s all part and parcel of the Hungarian
government’s policy of keeping people out or making their lives as
miserable as possible.”

Viktor
Orban,
the anti-immigration Prime Minister, has dubbed migrants “poison”
and claimed they are a threat to security and European culture that
must be held back. “If
we can’t do it nicely, we have to hold them back by force,” he
said. “And we will do it."